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<H2>An Overview of Adoption in China in the 1990s </H2>
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<P>Copyright &copy; by Amy Klatzkin </P>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-1"><I>In September, 1998 a small delegation
representing the Foundation for Chinese Orphanages (FCO)&#151;a nonprofit
organization founded by Families with Children from China/New England to help
orphanage children in China&#151;traveled to Hubei province as the guests of
the provincial Civil Affairs Bureau to monitor the use of funds provided by the
foundation. Amy Klatzkin wrote this article as part of a series on the
group&#146;s visit to six orphanages around the province. </I></FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-1">The current Chinese adoption law, which will be
superseded in April 1999 by new and more lenient regulations, was passed at the
end of 1991. In its wake a limited number of orphanages in China opened to
international adoption, most for the first time. The law&#146;s restrictions
applied equally to Mainland Chinese and foreigners: to adopt a healthy infant
from an orphanage, the parent or parents had to be over 35 and childless.
Parents with children by birth or adoption were required to adopt &#147;special
needs&#148; children (although this regulation was not always enforced,
particularly for foreigners). Beginning in April, both Chinese and foreigners
over age 30 will be permitted to adopt healthy infants even if they have
children already, and things will be different then. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-1">Why the tough regulations up to now? Like many
social policy decisions in China, the 1991 adoption law was largely an
instrument of population planning. The law was crafted to keep adoption from
being used as a way around birth restrictions. At the same time, international
adoption was seen as a way to curb an increasingly dire situation in the
nation&#146;s orphanages, where rising rates of abandonment&#151;mostly of
healthy infant girls&#151;was causing severe and dangerous overcrowding of
under- funded, ill-equipped social welfare institutions. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-1">The population planning regulations in effect
through most of this decade do not reduce to a simple one-child policy. Urban
Han Chinese are indeed restricted to one child, as are rural Chinese in very
densely populated areas, such as rural Sichuan. But in most of rural China,
where 80 percent of the people live, the policy most of this decade has been
&#147;one son/two children.&#148; In other words, if the first child is a boy,
that&#146;s it, but if it&#146;s a girl, couples are permitted to try again
after a set waiting period, often four years. In a few places the policy allows
two children, well spaced, regardless of the gender of the first. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-1">When one son/two children was introduced, most
observers expected abandonments to decrease. In fact, they rose precipitously,
mainly because this slightly more lenient policy was implemented much more
vigorously and consistently in rural areas than the policy of the mid 1980s had
been. Under these circumstances, the pressure on second-born girls appeared to
be much higher than it ever was on first- born girls. Why? Because, it appears,
Chinese people these days want to have a daughter. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-1">According to research by Kay Johnson and her
Chinese colleagues, abandoned baby girls are rarely first-born. If the first
child is a girl, her parents almost always keep her. But they need a son. China
has no social safety net&#151;no unemployment insurance, no social security.
Traditionally a son supports his parents in their old age. Without a son,
peasants face destitution in later life. Also, in this still highly patrilineal
culture, the family line dies out without a son to carry it on to the next
generation. So if the second child is also a girl&#151;or the third or even the
fourth, if the family is able to pay the escalating penalties for over-quota
births&#151;she is the one who is abandoned. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-1">It is likely that tens of thousands of
foundlings in China are adopted&#151;informally and illegally&#151; before they
ever enter the social welfare system. They&#146;re found on the doorsteps of
childless couples or brought home by Chinese families who then raise them as
their own. If these de facto adoptive parents are caught by the authorities,
they are often fined for the adoption just as if they had had an over-quota
birth. They also often find it difficult to get legal household registration
for their child, which may make it difficult later for the child to attend
school or receive other benefits. In some cases, neither the child&#146;s birth
nor her adoption is ever recorded, so that officially the child doesn&#146;t
exist. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-1">Of the foundlings that enter the welfare
system, again the majority of those that get families are adopted in China by
Chinese. International adoption has also been increasing. About 13,000 Chinese
children have been adopted by Americans since 1992, and about the same number
have been adopted collectively by Canadians (especially Qu&eacute;becois) and
Europeans (Scandinavians, Dutch, Spanish, British). </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-1">Since the &#147;Dying Rooms&#148; scandal and
subsequent Human Rights Watch campaign in 1995&#150;96, very few foreigners
have been permitted inside Chinese orphanages. That appears to be loosening up
in some places, particularly in major cities that have been doing international
adoptions for a long time. But it really was extraordinary that our small
delegation from the Foundation for Chinese Orphanages was permitted into six
orphanages in a week, five of them in small or rural municipalities. We were
the first foreigners ever to visit several of these orphanages, one of which
has never done international adoptions, and we were also the first to be
permitted into one of the flooded counties outside Wuhan, even though we had
among us a photojournalist&#151;the lowest of the low in the eyes of Chinese
adoption officials since the &#147;Dying Rooms,&#148; in which a team of
British journalists posing as tourists aired worldwide a film that strongly
implied all Chinese orphanages were little more than extermination camps for
abandoned baby girls. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-1">The extraordinary access we had,
photojournalist and all, was built on trust. We brought with us the 1998
donations to the Foundation for Chinese Orphanages from North American adoptive
parents, who were giving back to China&#146;s welfare system without demanding
anything in return, giving back because of the invaluable gifts we had
received&#151;our children, who once lived in these welfare centers and now
fill our lives with joy and wonder and love. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-1"><I>This article is reprinted from the San
Francisco Bay Area FCC newsletter (winter 1999). Amy Klatzkin is editor of A
Passage to the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China. Thanks
to Kay Johnson and her Chinese colleagues, whose pioneering research on
abandonment and adoption in China has begun to lift the veil surrounding our
children&#146;s origins and the circumstances that may have led to their
arrival in the welfare system. This overview is based largely on Kay Johnson,
Huang Banghan, and Wang Liyao, &#147;Infant Abandonment and Adoption in
China,&#148; Population and Development Review 24, no. 3 (Fall 1998).
</I></FONT></P>
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<FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="-2"><B>Last Updated: April 25th, 1999</B></FONT> 
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